For Cahills, a lesson in doing ‘right thing’

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On Friday, after a jury spent nearly 20 hours deliberating her husband’s fate, Tina Cahill had a blunt heart-to-heart discussion with her four daughters.

“I told them that if … if their father was convicted, things would be OK,” said the woman who married Tim Cahill a little more than 28 years ago.

“I let them know there would be an appeal,” Tina said last night, “but the most important thing I wanted them to know was that at then end of the day, no matter what happened, they knew who their father was. Nothing was going to change that. They understood the kind of man he was. And, as a family, we would get through this together.”

Yesterday, Tim and Tina Cahill, along with their daughters, relatives and friends, walked out of Suffolk Superior Court together, after a jury threw in the towel and declared itself deadlocked on a corruption charge they could not understand.

Tina Cahill said she has endured far too much upheaval over the past two years to allow herself to become giddy over a hung jury.

“On a personal level, this has always been an incredibly scary situation for us,” she said.

“The law says you are innocent until proven guilty. But the reality you feel pressing down on you from all sides is just the reverse: It’s trying to live with this feeling of being guilty until you are proven innocent.

“And basically, it’s about losing your life for two years.”

When the lights and cameras encircled Tim Cahill and his lawyers, Jeff Denner and Brad Bailey, outside Courtroom 908 yesterday afternoon, relief trumped all traces of anger and bitterness.

Like her husband, Tina Cahill resisted the bait to lash out at Attorney General Martha Coakley’s effort to bag the political scalp that happened to belong to her husband.

Instead, she opted to fall back on the character of the Quincy kid who’d won her heart a long time ago.

“Tim and I have always told our kids that if you do the right thing,” Tina said, “then the right thing will happen to you.

“One of my greatest fears through all of this was that if Tim had been convicted, then our girls would come to think, how can you believe in anything other than injustice?

“I did not want them to be swallowed up in bitterness. That was probably my biggest fear through all of this,” Tina explained, “that our children would come to lose their faith in the idea of justice.”

The past two years may have upended a good part of the life Tim and Tina Cahill once knew, but it did not destroy it.

“Actually, it was just the opposite,” Tina said.

“What we’ve gone through tested us, it made us stronger and brought us even closer together as a family who know we are loved by lots of friends.”